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Specialty Fashion managing director Gary Perlstein says the days when mass-market fashion retailers can copy the designs of global style-setters and “knock them off” in China have come to an end.

The arrival of international chains such as Zara and Topshop, and increased competition from global online retailers, has forced Specialty Fashion and its peers to invest heavily in design teams to differentiate their ranges and make it harder for consumers to compare products and prices on the web.

“Traditionally in our industry and particularly our market segment, in the mass market end, we would go overseas to the UK and US, we’d go to all the Zaras of the world and look at their styling and prints and product and do the same/same but different, take it via China and get it knocked off,” Mr Perlstein said.

“What we are doing now is we are setting for ourselves our own designs and prints without copying any of these global players . . . how can you when they’re now on our shores physically and online?

“We knew the global entrants were coming and we couldn’t use them for inspiration any more.”

Specialty Fashion, which runs one of Australia’s largest clothing store networks and owns the Millers, Katies, Crossroads and City Chic brands, now employs 10 designers plus support staff in its Sydney headquarters and is aiming to design all its products in-house.

“It’s a fundamental change to the DNA of our business,” he said.

Rivals such as Premier Investments, which owns Just Jeans, Portmans, Dotti, Jacqui E and Peter Alexander, have adopted a similar approach.

“In our core apparel brands we have internal product developers that look at the same things that international fashion houses look at, the catwalks and the latest collections that come out overseas, and then design to local conditions more than anything else – colour palettes, fabrics and weights of garments,” Premier retail chief executive Mark McInnes said. “In the last 12 months . . . we have separated the brands and now have specific brand heads and brand teams for each brand as opposed to a general model and that was a material change in the company’s approach.”

Even department store Myer is changing its business mode to protect sales from online and global competition. Myer chief executive Bernie Brookes has hired a team of 70 in-house designers and developers and is collaborating with designers such as Jayson Brunsdon and Toni Maticevski to make “exclusive” styles for Myer’s 57 private label brands. These brands, which include Basque, Miss Shop and Blaq, now account for 20 per cent of Myer’s sales, and margins are almost double those of wholesale brands.

“They’re brands we fully own, they’re very unique and vertically integrated and they’re highly lucrative for us . . . you can’t buy them anywhere else except Myer, you can’t price check them on the internet and, equally importantly, they provide intellectual property that can’t be mimicked by others in the market,” Mr Brookes said.